image journal & latest

[tiumakkonen-blog]

[ Image description: A colour photograph in square format. Shwedagon Paya, Myanmar. Four young boys, three of them dressed in traditional Buddhist monk’s red robes, sit in front of a golden shrine to the Buddha. The fourth boy is wearing regular layperson’s clothes, a white and red t-shirt with blue shorts. He is a little bit older than the young monks. He is looking straight at the camera, while the young monks aren’t paying particular attention. The boys are relaxed, hanging out amongst themselves, not conducting prayer despite sitting in the shade of the shrine. One of the young monks has a smartphone in his hands. The setting around them is very extravagant, shining with gold and yellow paint. A lion statue guards the shrine. There is a silver vase with red and yellow flowers, as well as a plastic water bottle which have been placed on the altar as gifts.]

Novice monks and friend at Shwedagon Paya, Myanmar. This day was important and the Pagoda was crowded with visitors come to pay respect to an ancient bone relic of the Buddha, transported to Yangon from India for only two days. The sun was hot and people were queueing for hours, sheltering each other with long spools of cloth held over their heads like a long colourful snake (https://www.instagram.com/p/BBHTucxy7Vq). There were television screens showing a live feed of the altar inside the main stupa, where the bone relic was held, so the pilgrims who didn’t make it inside could still see the sacred objects. All around these screens people were praying or trying to get a better look, a sea of smartphones in the air in order to get a photo of the teevee with the image of the relic. These boys were sitting in the shade of a shrine, probably tired after a long day. In Myanmar, boys are expected to join the monks’ order, Sangha, for the first time when they are over the age of seven as samanera, living in the monastery and learning the teachings of the Buddha. After age 20, they have another option to take the vows again and become fully ordained bhikkhu. The slightly older boy in regular clothes has probably already finished his three month stint as a samanera, but his friends are still free to hang out with him in their free time between their monastic duties.

© Tiu Makkonen

2016

Rolleicord Va, Kodak Portra 400 medium format film

[tiumakkonen-blog]

[ Image description: A colour photograph in square format. An elderly woman is sitting on a low plastic stool. She belongs to the Palau tribe of people from the Shan Hills in northern Myanmar. The camera is level with her near the ground, and she looks straight into the lens with a proud, somewhat amused gaze. Next to her on the left side of the frame is the woven bamboo wall of her shop. She is sitting in the fenced front yard of the building, in the shade of the house and some trees. On her head she wears a bright blue scarf, as well as a turquoise knitted cardigan and an orange and brown flower-patterned skirt. On her feet are a pair of blue and white sandals. The ground is hard packed dirt. Behind her by the fence of the yard is a wooden bench and another low, red plastic stool. ]

A Palau tribe village elder sits in front of her shop. After hiking for 55km over the span of two days in northern Myanmar, we finally descended down to the Shan foothills for the final leg of our journey. The previous day we had hiked 30km in the dense jungle covered hills, passing through Palau villages inaccessible by anything other than motorbikes, traipsing through tea plantations and finally sleeping in a tea pickers’ seasonal lodgings in our guide’s home village. I’d never done anything so physically demanding, and for some reason I decided to do it all with 1.5 kilograms of metal medium format camera slung from my neck (not the best idea when trying to descend a slippery, muddy jungle trail with a death drop canyon two feet away). But it was worth it, since it meant I always had the camera ready, such as when I went to buy a bottle of water and found this amazing village elder sitting watch outside the shop. I bought the water from a girl I presumed to be her grand-daughter, and asked for the woman’s portrait. I got on my knees in the dirt as it wouldn’t have been proper to shoot her from above, given her status. Her’s was the last village we walked through on what turned out to be one of the best adventures on our travels.

© Tiu Makkonen

2016

Rolleicord Va, Kodak Portra 400 medium format film

[tiumakkonen-blog]

[Image description: A colour photograph in square format. Two young Cambodian men stand on a yellow sandy beach near the waterline. They are placed centrally in the image and looking straight at the camera. Calm waves lap at the shore to their left, behind them the sky is pink from the sunset. Green trees line the beach, which stretches out empty into the horizon. Jungle-covered islands loom in the distance. The two men are shirtless, the one on the right wearing only red shorts with faded cartoon characters, and the one on the left wearing a red towel wrapped around his waist. Both men are barefoot, and the one on the left dangles a pair of flipflops from his left hand.]

Two crab fishermen on the beach in Koh Ta Kiev, a tiny island off the coast of Cambodia, come ashore after work. The island is about a one hour boat journey from the mainland, and enjoys no running water and electricity powered by a generator for only four hours a day. We stayed on the island for four days, sleeping in a windowless, doorless bamboo platform raised up on stilts, with the jungle to our backs and the ocean on our doorstep. It was Saturday night, and the local crabmen had finished their duties for the week and were celebrating a day off tomorrow. I was walking alone on the beach with my camera and struck up a conversation with these two lads. We walked around a bit chatting, and I asked to take a portrait of them. Like a gentleman, one of them offered to carry my shoes (the flipflops he is holding) while I manoeuvred the clumsy TLR camera. He proudly pointed out which fishing boat was his. After we parted ways, another enthusiastic young fisherman came to grab me by the shoulders and invited me to sit with the other men, who were well into their Saturday night whisky and eating raw clams. I politely declined the invitation and scuttled back to my original new friends (who were not partaking in the revelry), wary of my new whisky-smelling admirer, asking them to please escort me back to the place I was staying at as it was getting dark. So my Cambodian crab knights got me home safe, I offered to buy them a beer as thanks, but they politely declined and we bowed to part ways.

© Tiu Makkonen

2016

Rolleicord Va, Kodak Portra 400 medium format film

[tiumakkonen-blog]

[Image description: A colour photograph in square format. A young male Burmese Buddhist monk in his twenties stands in the doorway of an outdoor temple corridor. He is positioned centrally in the image, the doorway framing him all around. He is wearing reddish brown traditional monk’s robes with no shoes. He holds a brown-covered large smartphone in his hands and is looking at it intensely. The stone walls of the ancient temple around him are white and intricately carved. Above him fly several Buddhist flags. Behind him on the other side of the corridor is a similar doorway, which opens to an inner walled courtyard with trees and sunlight.]

A young Buddhist monk at the Ananda temple in Bagan, Myanmar checks his smartphone. Donning a monk’s robes is a rite of passage for boys in Myanmar, where men are expected to enter monkhood twice in their lives: once as a young novice, and later as a fully ordained monk in their twenties. Families from poorer backgrounds may choose to send their young boys to the temple in order to become monks, as it guarantees a free education, but the choice to stay is personal. Most men do not become monks for life, and continue to lead rather ordinary lives outside of their religious duties - it is not uncommon to see a group of young teenage boys, a few of them in monks’ attire, hanging out in the park fiddling with their smartphones and drinking energy drinks just like any gang of lads. This young monk in the photograph came outside to smoke and check his phone during a Buddhist festival at the Ananda temple in Bagan, Myanmar. When I asked for his permission to take a photo, he quickly chucked the cigarette (which can be seen on the ground by the pillar in the bottom left side of the frame).

© Tiu Makkonen

2016

Rolleicord Va, Kodak Portra 400 medium format film

[tiumakkonen-blog]

[Image description: A colour photograph cropped in square format. The photograph shows a scene from a rural mountain village in Myanmar. There are wooden bamboo and tin roofed houses dotted around a wide ochre coloured dirt road which winds into the distance. Far away at the end of the road is a white stupa with a golden spire. Beyond the stupa, hazy blue hills stretch out into the horizon. The sky is blue and clear. In the foreground of the image, two large bamboo mats have been laid out on the ground. They are covered with dark green tea leaves drying out in the sun. A local woman is crouching by one of the mats, tending to the leaves. A large white sack is next to her on the ground. She is wearing a pink beanie hat, a pale cardigan and a long purple skirt. Two other women are walking up the dirt road, both carrying large, heavy looking sacks. The woman walking in front is wearing a pink shirt and a green skirt, and the woman behind is wearing a blue shirt and yellow skirt. Lush green vegetation grows around the houses; two thin powerlines stretch over the scene and out of the corner of the frame. End description ]

A Palau tribe village high up in the Shan Hills in Shan State, northern Myanmar. The Palaung are one of the many ethnic minority tribes that live in the hills. They pride themselves as the master tea cultivators in the area, and many make their livelihood by growing and harvesting tea. The villages are very remote, often accessible only by a long day’s trek through the jungle-covered hills, and a village may only have one or two motorcycles between them for faster transportation along the winding mountain roads. Bamboo mats strewn with tea leaves lined the paths in every village we passed, the smell bringing to mind something akin to a wet goat. Not to be dismayed by the aroma, we got to sample some at our resting place for the night, and as foreign guests, we were privileged to receive what we were informed was the highest quality version of the tea. The building we stayed in was a tea pickers’ seasonal lodgings, built for temporary workers arriving for the harvest season. 

This part of Myanmar is beautiful, but politically quite unstable as the government army and the local hill tribe militia fight over control of the region. The illegal opium trade funds both sides of the fighting. Tourist access is not permitted without a local guide and travellers must be wary of any recent fighting or military activity which might prohibit trekking in the hills. Our guide Aung San, a young man from the Palau village where we spent the night, told us the local militia requires any families with three or more boy children to sign at least one of them up for the army against the government. Children would sometimes be hid in wells or silos when word of the military approaching the village came round, with the family covering their hiding place with the tea-covered bamboo mats as a means of disguise.

© Tiu Makkonen

2016

Rolleicord Va, Kodak Portra 400 medium format film

[tiumakkonen-blog]

[Image description: a black and white photograph cropped in square format. 

A portrait of an elderly Sardinian woman. She is sitting in an old fashioned kitchen on a stool covered with striped cloth. She is positioned centrally in the image, her body in profile facing towards the right, with her face slightly tilted upwards and past camera right. Her hands rest in her lap. Her hair is short, dark and slightly wavy. Her expression is intense in concentration, perhaps in thought or looking at someone outside the frame. She wears a light coloured wool sweater nipped from use, the sleeves neatly rolled up for work. A striped floral apron is tied at her waist over her dark trousers, and she wears a scarf around her neck. Behind her is a large traditional stone oven of the type used for baking bread, the white masonry blackened from decades of dedicated use. A fire is blazing inside the hearth now. An analogue clock on the wall declares the time nearly quarter past 10. End description. ]

© Tiu Makkonen

Signora Pina, 78 years old, on Christmas Eve morning in Sant’Antioco waiting for the oven to finish heating for her pane al pomodoro. Signora Pina has been baking since she was a child and is one of the few in her community to still retain knowledge of the traditional ways of the craft. The baking of the bread is a delicate and time-consuming affair, including the proper ritual of lighting the fire three times to heat the ancient stones, brushing away the ashes and perfuming the hearth with bunches of mastic leaves, and keeping the temperature in the bakery just right while the loaves bake. The dough needs to rise at least overnight, and a mixture of olive oil, fresh basil, pungent garlic and plump cherry tomatoes is carefully folded into the loaves before baking. 

2015

Rolleicord Va, Kodak T-Max 400 medium format film

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[ Image description: A colour photograph cropped in a square format. A young white European woman standing in a snowy landscape with black leafless trees, a hint of a river and snowcapped hills in the background. The sky is grey and overcast. She is positioned slightly left of centre with her whole body in view. Behind her is a large roaring orange bonfire made of green pine branches and white billowing smoke.  She is wearing a traditional Nordic costume consisting of a long sleeved white blouse with red embroidery around the cuffs and collar, a green vest with small golden clasp at the waist, and a mid-calf length striped wool skirt of red, blue and green. She has a white apron over the skirt with white and red tassels at the hem, and a red and black striped pocket on her left hip. Her boots are black with thick white socks. Her hair is short and brown, and on her head she wears a red cloth headpiece with a golden yellow inlay. Two long silk ribbons hang from the headpiece, one black and one green, drawn forward over her left shoulder and descending past her chest. She is standing straight with her arms at her sides, her body facing the camera but her face gazing towards the distance on the left side of the image. Her expression is quite neutral with a hint of defiance, or perhaps thoughtfulness. She does not seem bothered by the fire behind her. End description. ]

Fire/Fallow

© Tiu Makkonen

2016

Rolleicord Va, Kodak Portra 400 medium format film